Progressive web enhancement and developing Gutenberg blocks

04 Dec'19

An evening which is sure to appeal to those with an interest in coding with WordPress. We’ve got two fantastic developers joining us and sharing their knowledge. Andy Bell will be talking about progressive web enhancement. Not sure what that is? Us neither, we’re looking forward to finding out more! And Nicola Heald, from Automattic will be showing us how to get started with creating our own Gutenberg blocks, which is something we think we all need help with at the moment!

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1. The Power of Progressive Enhancement – Andy Bell

We dive into why progressive enhancement is important and how we can leverage the power of Vanilla JavaScript, Web Components and modern CSS to deliver a hack-free, lightweight and progressive experience for our users.

Skill level: Intermediate

About Andy Bell

An independent designer and front-end developer with a focus on progressive enhancement and accessibility.

2. Gutenberg: Where do we start? – Nicola Heald

Are you a PHP developer who doesn’t know where to get started with Gutenberg and blocks? Do all the options and jargon confuse you when it comes to setting up a modern JavaScript development environment? Did you get frustrated reading Gutenberg documentation that presumed you’re already an expert JavaScript developer? Wonder why we need this Gutenberg thing anyway?

Yeah, not long ago, Nicola was here too.

This talk will take you through the easiest way to get started making Gutenberg blocks in minutes.

We’ll cover:

* Writing your first React components.
* The structure of a block.
* The easiest way to get a development environment set up.
* Writing a block – line by line!
* The best resources Nicola’s found to get going – the ones that took her from having very basic JavaScript knowledge to contributing to the core of Gutenberg!

Skill Level: Intermediate

About Nicola Heald

Hello! I’m Nicola Heald, professional developer and tall person. I started writing PHP back in version 3, and have done development and sysadmin roles at companies like Canonical, HP, IBM, and I’m now at Automattic, uncovering horrible edge case bugs in JavaScript and PHP. I like chocolate, Radiohead, the ukulele, and efficient Continuous Integration pipelines. JavaScript is cool. PHP’s ubiquitousness is awesome. There’s little more beautiful that an well optimised SQL query.

*If you find you can no longer make this meeting please do change your RSVP. As we provide food for these events it is helpful for us to know what number to cater for and of course to ensure that the waitlist is kept as short as possible. Thanks.

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Please arrive from 6.30pm. You will be greeted by our friendly and knowledgable volunteers who will help you get your name badge and get settled in. We aim to start the talks at around 7pm so there’s plenty of time to meet our other members, get a drink and have a graze from the buffet we provide thanks to our generous sponsors.

We usually start the night off with some updates about what’s happening in the local and national WordPress community and members are welcome to add their own updates. Speak to one of the organisers wearing a red name badge before we start if you’d like to say or ask something.

After the first talk we take a break and then have our second talk. Following that if you want to stick around a few of us usually hang around for another drink and chat. The talks usually finish around 9.15pm (ish).